Hajar Yazdiha's "The Struggle for the People’s King"

Hajar Yazdiha is assistant professor of sociology and a faculty affiliate of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her first book, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement, and reported the following:

Page 99 concludes a chapter on battles over civil rights memory between the progressive LGBTQ movement and the conservative family values movement. This page describes how each group had worked to claim the memory of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement to take the moral high ground in their political battles.

More importantly, this page describes the consequences of these strategies where conservative groups increasingly use Dr. King to frame themselves as the new oppressed minorities fighting for their rights. As I write on page 99,

As conservative groups attempted to both discredit progressive groups’ claims to civil rights memory and establish their own claims to memory, rainbow coalitions were forming to challenge the reactionary right-wing movements that were gaining popularity in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential campaign.

It's incredible how well the Page 99 Test works here! Though we’re only getting a snapshot from one of the cases in the book (other chapters take on different social movements), the takeaways about the co-optation of civil rights memory are a throughline. From page 99 we get a sense of how the book explores the political misuses of Dr. King and how they matter for contemporary politics.

One of the major takeaways of The Struggle for the People’s King is that the political misuses of Dr. King and civil rights memory are not just rhetorical. These are intentional political strategies and they have powerful effects. These misuses of memory don’t just change the way we collectively remember the racial past. They also shape the way we make sense of the present, tackle social problems together, and direct action toward the future. This is where the real danger of historical revisionism lies, in its capacity to evade social reality.

There is a popular way of understanding the divisive nature of American political culture as a matter of polarization. My book shows that it is not that we are polarized into different sides of the same coin. Through the politics of historical revisionism, we have diverged in our conceptions of social reality. We are living on different planes.

Despite this grim reality, at the core of The Struggle for the People’s King are these perennial questions about identity and belonging. What does it take to feel like we belong, to a community, to a nation, and to one another? How does our understanding of our place in society, our connection to its past, shape our imaginations of what type of society may be possible?

Dr. King said, “The difference between a dreamer and a visionary is that a dreamer has his eyes closed and a visionary has his eyes open.” My book is an invitation to readers to confront the past, present, and future with eyes wide open, to come together in community, to be visionaries.

Visit Hajar Yazdiha's website.

--Marshal Zeringue